Go into the city, the St. Louis art museum in forest park is free and huge. As far as museums go there's also the Kemper at wash u, the history museum in forest park, the science center. These are all free.

Botanical gardens have free music in the gardens Thursday nights in summer.

Multiple awesome farmers markets throughout the week.

Delmar loop is a fun district, as is tower grove, as is Cherokee.

Multiple festivals throughout the year such as taste of nations, food truck Friday, and more. Most of these are free or cheap.

Amazing local food in every genre, including lots of dope food trucks always out after bar time (as well as throughout the day)

Job market is reasonably good (awesome if you work in tech)

It's cheap. St. Louis has very cheap rent and a low cost of living. It's honestly a hidden gem.

By contrast Sarasota really has nothing comparable to that stuff. All museums down here have an entry fee. Mote aquarium is cool but very expensive.

Job market is awful unless you want to work in medicine, elder care, or tourism. You need to drive fucking everywhere and traffic is absurdly bad because of how poorly laid out the roads are. Rent is expensive down here, slightly over national average. It's mostly big box stores and restaurants with a small amount of local joints. The food isn't bad if you like seafood but outside of that it's kind of slim pickings.

It's cool living by the ocean, but expensive to do much on it beyond hang out at the beach. There's some cool swampy nature like myakka state park. You're 40 minutes from st Pete down here and st Pete has some cool stuff.

Anyway, it sounds like you haven't done much in stl and honestly you're missing out. That city is amazing. If you're living in granite city or something, that's your issue. You want to live in the actual city or at least one of the integrated suburbs.

If you want to move down here for the beach or weather, live in st Pete not Sarasota. Sarasota is designed for wealthy white 60+ year olds and tourists.

Eh, I like Foer usually but this article is kind of just saying obvious things without unpacking them in any way. Of course the greatest technological shift in human history is going to cause a shift in the way we experience the world (and likely even the way our consciousness is wired) but this doesn't go beyond saying simple things like phones distract us. It doesn't really unpack what he means by contrasting bright experiences with deep ones.

What are you doing that takes you hours to figure out in eloquent? Not to mention you're getting an eloquent object back, rather than just the query results. If you set up your models correctly, this means you can have methods on that object to do all sorts of things like validation / data transformation on get/set and a whole host of other stuff.

Eloquent isn't strictly necessary, but it does what any reasonable ORM does. ORMs are fine for convenience, but come at a performance hit.